The rain fell like countless fine needles, piercing the mountains of Blackrock County in dense sheets.
The sky was smeared with leaden gray, the clouds hanging so low they seemed almost within reach.
Veylin stood on the hastily erected command tower. Through his telescope, rain blurred the edges of the prism.
"What a damned place."
Ola wiped the rain from his face, crystalline droplets clinging to his beard. His battleaxe rested in the mud, its blade stained with traces of dark red rust-the marks left by locally mined hematite dust rapidly oxidizing in the damp air.
"There's something wrong with the magnetic field here." Ola took out a compass, its needle slowly spinning. "Knight Stuka reported that the interference has robbed the Great Skuas of their sense of direction. On top of that, the air currents are running wild through the mountains. The Great Skuas are hard to control, and their combat effectiveness has dropped sharply."
Veylin lowered his telescope and sighed.
Ravines crisscrossed the landscape, and most of the slopes were steep. This terrain really was giving him a headache.
Worse still, although there was no clear evidence, the local nobles were suspected of having built numerous interference magic arrays. These severely obstructed the Hive Matrix's signal transmission, causing commands to cut in and out-a problem they had never encountered before.
"Has the probing attack begun?" Veylin asked.
"Alex has gone up with the Third Regiment." Ola pointed at the gray-white stone fort wedged like a nail into the mountainside ahead. "That's Shatterfang Fort. It guards the largest winding mountain road leading to the main mining district."
Veylin raised his telescope again.
Through the lens, a column clad in dark red Living Graft Armor was laboriously inching up a scree-covered slope.
Alex frowned slightly. The road was more troublesome